Memoirs

Image

CreditIllustration by John Gall

By Domenica Ruta

May 9, 2014

THE LAST PIRATEA Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of MarijuanaBy Tony DokoupilDoubleday, $26.95.

If you smoked Colombian weed in the continental United States between 1970 and 1986, odds are good that the author’s father, Big Tony Dokoupil, was your supplier. A graduate school dropout whose heroin addiction exempted him from the Vietnam War draft, Big Tony had all the makings of an extralegal superstar: handsome, smart, prone to romantic self-mythologizing, and he lived up to the mythology in time. Big Tony moved his first brick of marijuana in 1970, the same year Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act, firing the first shots of what would eventually turn into Reagan’s war on drugs. Marijuana became a Schedule I narcotic, cast as highly addictive and deadly, a scourge on society requiring a new set of draconian punishments.

It was just the kind of challenge Big Tony wanted. Impatient with honest, low-stakes work, he found rebellion as thrilling as any chemical high he pursued. After 14 years in the business, he had amassed more money than he could keep track of, with millions of dollars lost in beer coolers buried across America. Amid all this chaos, Tony started a family with a cleareyed, resourceful schoolteacher who made sure to invest in the one thing the government and the drug trade could never take away — a top-notch education for their only son, Little Tony.

What happens to the Dokoupil family is inevitable: Big Tony walks out on his wife and their 6-year-old son so he can dive deeper into the squalor of cocaine addiction. Former friends and colleagues start ratting, and Big Tony recedes further into the hell he seemed to crave. This titan of the pot trade would have become an obscure footnote, but Big Tony’s son and namesake, a senior writer for NBC News, took an inheritance of psychic loss and transformed it into a probing, exuberant memoir about the history of the American drug economy, the ambitions and failures of politicians and outlaws, fathers and sons. After years of estrangement, Little Tony reunites with his father looking for answers. The result is a fascinating tale about the wreckage of addiction and the shadow side of the American dream.

EXODUSA MemoirBy Deborah FeldmanBlue Rider, $26.95.

In her first memoir, “Unorthodox,” Feldman made the courageous choice to cut off ties with her family and the Satmar community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a sect of conservative, isolationist Hasidim, some of whom believe the Holocaust was God’s punishment for the crime of assimilation. Now a divorced woman in her 20s, Feldman chronicles the next phase of her life in her new book. It opens with Feldman suffering from insomnia and panic attacks, questioning the role of genetics and fate in her newly liberated life. Is she doomed to wander the earth an outcast like her mother, who also left the Satmar community and essentially abandoned young Feldman to the care of grandparents? Has she inherited the trauma and resulting depression of her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor? Is the price she paid for her escape into the secular world a life of perpetual anxiety? Without a tribe, will she ever be whole again?

Image

Feldman goes on a quest of self-discovery, starting with a shamanic healer in the corner of rural New England where she now lives with her young son. She sets off on a series of trips across the United States and Europe, seeking a wider vision of Jews in the modern world, in the hope of finding her rightful place. Some of the most powerful scenes come when Feldman retraces the path of her female ancestors in Hungary and confronts the anti-Semitism of contemporary Europe. But the book becomes a travelogue full of flat-footed metaphors belaboring the point of her sometimes moving, other times lamentable, observations. (She compares forcing Jews to manufacture guns for the Nazis to “feeding chicken to a chicken.”)

On American soil she navigates love and sex in the secular world. In these chapters the memoir sounds shockingly ordinary, as though Feldman had been a member of the “Girls” generation all along, and not a recently exiled Hasid suffering from PTSD. But what it lacks in grace “Exodus” makes up for in heart, as Feldman ultimately discovers that her rightful place is wherever she happens to be.

DAUGHTER OF THE KINGBy Sandra Lansky and William StadiemWeinstein Books, $26.

At a supper club in New Jersey when Lansky was 10 or 11 years old, a nervous young singer stopped by her table to pay homage to her father and accidentally knocked a bucket of ice, in which Sandra’s ginger ale was cooling, all over her lap. The singer was terror-stricken, but when little Sandi responded with a good-natured laugh, it was “as if I had saved his life, . . . like getting a thumbs up from a Roman empress.” That singer was Frank Sinatra, the nightclub was owned by Sandra’s “uncle” Willie Moretti, a.k.a. Willie Moore, and her father was none other than Meyer Lansky — the architect of Murder Inc., a founding father of Las Vegas and the man later fictionalized as Hyman Roth in “The Godfather: Part II.”

Lansky recounts her life of luxury as her father’s favorite sidekick, as it was she, and not her mentally ill mother, who accompanied Meyer on his business throughout New York, New Jersey, Florida, Cuba and eventually Las Vegas. Sandra Lansky knew by the look in her father’s eye when it was time to go play with the hatcheck girls at Dinty Moore’s. But she didn’t know her father was a gangster until she was 13, after his first Senate hearing in 1951.

Hers was a sheltered, privileged childhood that evolved into rebellious adolescence. Sandra dated Dean Martin, married a man who turned out to be a gay “fortune hunter” when she was just 16, then fell in love with an undercover F.B.I. agent. (It didn’t end so badly, considering.) Meyer Lansky, true to his reputation, remained cool throughout his daughter’s romantic follies, and the portrait she paints of him is that of an exceptionally loving patriarch. Sandra eventually married a man on the periphery of the Gambino crime family whom Meyer negotiated out of service to the mob in order to establish a legitimate life for his daughter and son-in-law. The book is studded with riveting personal stories about Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano, Sinatra and the Kennedys. Sandra Lansky, along with her co-writer, William Stadiem, has assembled a work of retrospective honesty that delivers an intimate look inside the mob.